Is the simplicity of the point and click web interface threatened by the growth in non-browser based web applications? Is the simplicity worth the cost in terms of inefficiency/lack of power UI features? Santa answers "yes" and "no" respectively in this ITWorld, e-Business in the Enterprise article.

In this business, you can be wrong in one of two ways. (a) you can be wrong and outvoted by a majority who are right. (b) you can be right but outvoted by a majority who have fallen for a fallacy.
Inevitable Technology Illusions is an ITWorld article on this subject.

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm not a big fan of object abstractions for distributed systems. Part of my mission at the moment is to promote a vision of loosely coupled systems that gets most of its power from starting with asynchronous XML messaging as its primary abstraction.
Its hard work. There is a lot of wishful thinking out there that just hopes against hope that XML/Web Services is the magic sauce that will make distributed objects work. It won't. This interview with Anders Hejlsberg of C# (and Turbo Pascal and Delphi) fame contains some gems.

"The problem with that type of programming [OO] is: it works great in a single process; it works quite well across processes; it works fairly well in a small intranet; but then it completely sucks thereafter."

"If you hide the fact that messages go across a network, and don't know when they go across, you end up with chatty conversations. And all of a sudden, the speed of light can become a big problem for you."

"...Whereas, we know precious little about how to scale CORBA systems in a geo-scalable fashion. We just don't. There's just no knowledge about it, and I've never heard of anyone being particularly successful doing it."